


Other Virtues

by websandwhiskers



Series: Choosing Wonderland [4]
Category: Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Genre: Angst, F/M, First Time, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-10
Updated: 2011-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 11:22:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websandwhiskers/pseuds/websandwhiskers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice and Tarrant aren't dead, no one is dreaming, and there are many sorts of virtue. [Warning:  Reference to past torture (non-sexual)]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other Virtues

For a long, long moment Tarrant merely stares at her outstretched hand as if he's never seen a hand before. Then, slowly, while Alice's heart hammers and her houseslipper-clad toes want to bury themselves among the hats for shame, while she wants to shove her skirts down over her bare legs and doesn't, and a breeze that smells of cherry blossoms and strange beasts blows in from the field, Alice watches her Mad Hatter's madness fade entirely away.

It isn't what she expected. It makes her feel almost guilty to find the entirely sane, wistful man who'd wished her _fairfarren_ staring down at her now. But he'd been wrong, she reminds herself, and holds her trembling hand steady, willing to wait for him. Years, if he requires them, because he'd been wrong, and she remembers everything. 

Not just here - she remembers _everything,_ laying there, the breeze tickling the fine, pale hairs of her legs, the smell of Bandersnatch and hay and early, misty spring threatening to make her eyes start running all over again. Bits of childhood she thought she'd lost reassert themselves, and not all of them are to do with Wonderland - she remembers her father swinging her round and round much as Tarrant just had, only she'd been so much smaller, and her feet had swung right off the ground. She'd flown, once upon a time. She remembers hiding in the stables with a book - long conversations with the horses while the grooms pretended not to see her there. She remembers that her mother used to laugh when she found her. She remembers that her mother used to _laugh._

That, Alice thinks, as still he watches her, _that_ is what she wants, and _this_ is part of how that must happen. She doesn't know why but she knows - her blood needs to hammer, she needs to feel every breath she takes, every inch of her skin, just like this, like something in her is about to shatter into a million pieces, and it _needs_ to.

He takes her hand; his fingers tremble just as much as hers. They're cold from the breeze. He sinks to his knees between her feet, and his free hand moves to cup the side of her face. "Alice," he says, thickly, has to swallow. "Alice, what you're offering -"

"I'm not offering," Alice interrupts. "Or at least, not only offering. I'm also asking. Why is so much made of a woman's virtue, and so little of a man's?"

"You're making assumptions," Tarrant argues, "that I have virtue to give you. Also, men are somewhat less likely than women to get with child."

"Fair enough," Alice allows, pauses, considers her words carefully. "Were this Above land, this would be the part where you would promise that, should such a thing occur, you would take care of me."

He frowns. "I would think it would be the wee one who would need caring for."

Alice smiles - blindingly, she'd say, from the look on his face when she does. "You see?" she says, "That's precisely why I'm not frightened at all. We'll take care of each other."

She reaches out, one-handed - the fingers of her other hand still twined with his and clutching - and begins to untie his cravat. She makes clumsy work of it because she's not looking at what she's doing, she's holding his gaze until he smiles - that disbelieving, wanting, hopeful smile of the battlefield at the end of the day, and she can't decide if she never should have left him, or if she did exactly right. If this was always how it was meant to end.

Well, this was how it did end, and Alice decides they'll just make it the end that it should be.

"Yes," Tarrant agrees, softly. His hand slips from her cheek, begins to work on the buttons of her blouse even as she finally manages to free the cloth from around his neck. He gets only a few of her buttons open before he stops, slips his hand inside. His fingers are still chilled but the center of his palm is hot, pressed just above her left breast. Her heartbeat is a wooshing, rushing boom of sound and feeling inside her, like thunder, like she's gone hollow - she wasn't prepared at all for the feel of his hand on her, even such a relatively innocent touch.

"Yes, we'll take care of each other," Tarrant agrees, "So wise, my Alice."

"I don't feel wise," Alice whispers. She swallows and licks her lips and swallows again and for just a moment, wonders what she's gotten herself into - but his own shirt buttons are misaligned and easy for even her shaking fingers to pop, so that she can press her own hand to his chest, mirroring his. He's so pale, so very pale, and the skin feels strange under her fingertips, uneven. Scars, she realizes, so very many scars.

"Wise people never do," Tarrant tells her, whispering as if confiding a secret. He pulls both his hands away from her, and for a moment she's rudderless, lost - then he takes her other hand, the one pressed against his chest, in both of his. He turns it over, examines it, runs his fingers over her fingers and down the pulsing vein at her wrist - thunder, she thinks again, summer storms running in her blood. She wonders if he can hear them.

He raises her hand to his lips and kisses her palm, and it's like a jolt of lightning through her. She inhales sharply, and he looks up to her face. He looks . . . pleased. Very pleased.

"There is a virtue to lack of virtue," he suggests - his tone is brazen but his eyes are cautious, offering this out to her and not sure she'll accept. "Not, of course, that I'd prefer you unvirtuous - but also, of course, that I'd not mind were you not."

Alice bites her lip, tugs her hand free, and goes back to work on his buttons so that she has a good excuse to duck her head. "I'm not _so_ virtuous," she offers, and can't believe she's actually saying so, but is this or is this not about baring one's self to another? "That is to say, I have - well, I haven't - well I'm not mad or sickly so _that's_ a load of rubbish, and if that's a load of rubbish then I don't know why I'm stammering and evading and not saying - well. Perhaps you shouldn't expect me to be surprised by - by everything, but there's been no one else. No other men." She pauses a beat. "Or women. That wasn't what I meant. Oh damn it all, _please_ tell me you understand?"

He raises her chin in both hands and kisses her, just brief and gentle, and says, "You are _delightfully_ mad, my Alice." He smiles at her. "My Alice. I think I may go around saying that quite excessively for a while."

"My Tarrant," she repeats back. His smile goes heartbreakingly wide. "We shall make everyone very sick of the pair of us. Thank you for not minding."

"Your saying my name?" he asks, in entirely feigned confusion.

"My . . lack of chastity," Alice offers.

"I'm not sure why one would want chastity in a lover," Tarrant replies. "It doesn't seem like a very useful quality in that circumstance. Rather like wishing for clumsiness in a archer."

She giggles, as he'd no doubt meant her to do, and he looks pleased again, but a somewhat different sort of pleased - not that she likes this look any less than the last. She wants, Alice finds, to discover every possible variation of that happy-with-himself expression that his face can possibly make.

"Well, that's not how it's thought about Above," Alice offers, shrugging.

"Are you disappointed, then?" he asks, the satisfied look fading a bit. "In me, that I am less virtuous than you are, though also unvirtuous in the same way that you are, I should tell you, as it's been a rather long time since there's been anyone to be unvirtuous with, that is to say, to be unvirtuous in the ways that you still are virtuous, and I am not, and does that -"

"Tarrant!" Alice interrupts, taking his face in her hands. His eyes settle on her. "It does not," she says firmly. "For whatever you've been and done and with whom, it's all part of what's brought you here, and I'm rather glad you're here. Now. With me."

It takes a moment for his eyes to settle. Then he says, quite simply, "Me too."

"Then I pronounce this conversation _over,_ " Alice declares, and returns to attacking the buttons of his waistcoat.

"Wise, wise Alice," Tarrant murmers, and kisses the top of her ear. His vest comes undone, then the rest of the buttons of his shirt, and Alice is suddenly uncertain whether she should remove those garments entirely or move on to the fastenings of his pants, just to have done with all the fastenings at once. In her moment of indecision he decides for her, plucking his cufflinks from his cuffs in a way that can't be good for the longevity of his shirts. He tosses the cufflinks off into the hay and then shrugs both garments off in one go.

He's so very pale, and it makes the scars all the more startling, interrupting the dusting of hair across his chest, cutting into the trail of it down his stomach. Jagged rips of scars, and lashes, and splatters - things she doesn't want to understand, but is afraid she does. She has a splatter like that on her right wrist - she spilled scalding wax on herself once, when she was very small and had thought to take a candle out of its sconce to go exploring the house in the dark. Her scar is little and old and faded; his are not. Some are still so red as to hardly be called scars yet at all.

Alice leans forward as if pulled, kissing the place where she'd earlier put her hand, over the frantic thud of his heart. He draws in a sharp breath, then says, "A moment," and turns away. He stands, and she can hear him working at the fastenings of his trousers. He toes off his shoes, then his socks. Alice sheds her own slippers and wobbles to her own unsteady feet, so she's standing close behind him as he loses his last bits of covering.

His back is just a mess of lashes; some of them still have scabs.

"Perhaps this was not the best time," Tarrant suggests, still facing away from her. "I really am not fond of time, not at all, I try to avoid him whenever possible, but still, perhaps I haven't seen enough of him between . . between . . "

"Shh," says Alice, grasps his shoulders, and kisses the back of his neck. He's left his hat on, so she doesn't touch it, just leaves it where it is. He gives another gasp that turns into something that's sort of a giggle and sort of a cry and mostly he's shaking. She runs her hands up and down his arms, soothing, feeling her own skin tingle with the sensation of the lean muscle under her fingers. He's far too thin, ribs and hip bones and shoulder blades poking out everywhere, but this body is _him,_ which makes it perfect.

"Shhh," Alice repeats. "We'll take care of each other, remember?"

"That was rather specifically in reference to -"

"We'll take care of each other," Alice repeats decidedly. "Trust me?"

"Always. Forever. Cross my heart and hope to -"

"Don't," Alice blurts.

He stops, and gives another unsettled giggle, and says, "Sticks and stones."

"Don't care," Alice argues. "I'm not chancing it."

There's a long quiet. He feels very warm where her front is pressed to his back, very warm and very alive, all breath expanding ribs and heartbeat thudding and muscles quivering under her hands.

"It broke you a little too, didn't it?" he finally says, and it's mournful. "Even the little bit that you saw, and Alice, you saw so very little. So little. I didn't want you to see even that much, wanted you just brave and shining and glorious. Not like this. Not like me."

"But you make me brave," Alice argues. She slides her left hand down his arm to tangle her fingers through his; her right she slides down his back and around his side, palm flat against his chest and waiting there.

He says nothing, just breathes, the movement of his diaphragm pressing into her own chest. Her face is pressed between his shoulders, his spine against her ear. She's facing the outside wall so that she can see, over the edge of it, at the top, where it's open but for a few supporting beams, letting the air in - she can see a patch of blue, blue sky and a few tangled limbs of trees, just dusted with green. Her fingers spread, exploring. She can feel what makes him gasp, what makes his left hand in hers clutch to the point of bruising, as her right hand slides lower.

"This is alright?" she asks; he's breathing in broken, shaking lurches.

"Aye. Yes. Yes, please, yes, _Alice._ "

She's _curious,_ she wants to _see -_ but later. Maybe not even this time, if that's what he needs. Her cheek rubs against rough scabs and smooth, new skin trying to regrow and outside, where the air smells of wild things, the branches sway in the wind. Her bare toes curl and heat swells low in her body and she feels him tense, shift, tentative movements as if he's forgotten how his body works.

"Tell me what to do?" she asks.

He shakes his head frantically, his long hair brushing her forehead, tangling her own. "Not for the world," he chokes out. "Just - what you're doing. What you're _wanting_ to do. Tell me you want to do this, Alice? Tell me?"

"I want this," she says, and emphasizes her words with her hand. "I want you. I want everything about you, I want -"

He makes a strangled sound and his right hand shoots out to grab her wrist, stilling her.

"Do you want me to stop?" she asks. She doesn't ask if she did something wrong, if she hurt him - it occurs to her that she should, that she might have, but she doesn't think so. His body doesn't feel so.

"Not ever," he says, and laughs shakily, "but I was under the impression that you wanted things I won't be able to give you if you don't."

Oh.

Alice isn't entirely sure she understands that, but she takes her hand away, returns it to his shoulder. His left hand gives hers a reassuring squeeze. "I want more," she says plainly, turning her face into his back so that she speaks with her lips moving against his spine; it sounds at once very childish and very _not_ childish at all.

He turns around, still holding her left hand, and doesn't let go until her arm is wrapped around him and they're pressed just as closely front to front as she was to his back just a moment ago. Her fingers curl at the small of his back, her other arm winding around him of its own accord at the look on his face. It's wonderful and terrible and no one should ever be so broken as to look at another human being that way, and she never wants him to stop. She feels like the universe is spinning in her chest, when he looks at her like that. She only hopes she's looking the same way back at him.

"You have too many clothes on, Alice," he tells her, lips quirking upward.

She manages a rather breathless chuckle in response as his hands go to work on correcting that situation, moving too quickly and nimbly to be entirely human, and she suspects that her mother and sister and everyone else she's ever met would tell her that that shouldn't do the strange things to her body that it does - the idea that perhaps he's something a bit _else,_ a bit _other_ just as much as talking dormice and evaporating cats. It does, though, and she adores that it does.

Then she's standing in a pile of blouse and skirt and petticoat and chemise, and she has just enough presence of mind to kick them all to the side so that they don't obscure the fact that she's still standing in a pile of hats.

He doesn't look like he's noticing the hats anymore. There's a space created between them by the sudden absence of her voluminous skirts, and she can see him just as clearly. There's a little frission of fear, and a larger desire to touch and explore (and maybe taste?) all over again now that she can see, but then his hands are on her, rough and shaking and just as curious as her own, and he's sinking to his knees in front of her again.

"Alice," he murmurs, low and tender and amazed. "Alice, _Alice,_ you're so very - so pale here, and warm, and - and _Alice_ -"and she loses track of what exactly he's saying, but the words feel like touches and his hands on her feel like words, like whispered endearments, like _love_ and _want_ and _take care of you, take care of each other._

"Tarrant," she says, her hands tangling in his hair. She doesn't know what she wants to say. _"Tarrant."_

"Alice," he repeats back, trailing kisses down her stomach, "Alice, Alice, _Alice."_

She cries out wordlessly when he goes lower, and he pulls back. "No?" he asks.

"No, no - I mean, yes," Alice says, trying to remember how to breath. She massages his scalp with her fingertips where she's pretty sure she just tugged his hair, very hard. His hat's fallen off, she suddenly realizes, and she has no idea when that happened. "Yes, please?" She giggles nervously. "If - if you want - ah!"

He doesn't answer her verbally. Her skin doesn't know if it wants to be hot or cold; there's wind blowing over her, cold spring wind from the gap in the wall at the top of the stall and she can barely stay on her feet, she's swaying and his hands are holding her hips steady and she can feel the roughness of the bandages on his fingertips against skin that's never seen daylight before, and it's too much, almost enough, almost -

\- and he stops.

Alice practically wails, the sound ripping out of her before she can stop it, and then she's flushing, mortified, as he looks up at her knowingly. _There's another self-satisfied expression. You're keeping track, remember?_ her dazed brain reminds her. _That's three._

"We can go wherever you'd like from here," he offers. "Forward. Back. Sideways." He stops and frowns. His hands are still on her hips, rubbing up and down, comforting, like she'd done earlier, with his shoulders. "I'm not entirely sure what sideways would entail, but we could explore the matter."

And he smiles at her, warm and _him_ and reassuring, and he's babbling entirely for her benefit and she knows it. It gives her the extra smidgeon of muchness she needs to say, "Forward," and sink down, a bit wobbly, straddling his knees. Alice takes his face in both her hands and kisses him, long and slow and messy, and shimmies forward. She can feel him pressed against her and it makes her tense, good tensing and fearful tensing all at once and she wonders, just for a moment, if she can really do this, if she's really going to do this.

Then he breaks the kiss and presses his cheek against hers, the faint roughness of it tickling, and whispers into her ear, "Shh. Take care of each other, remember? Trust me?"

"I think I'd be long dead if I didn't," Alice replies, the words just falling out in a nervous rush before she can think better of them. It was the wrong thing to say, completely the wrong thing to say, she knows it -

\- and he leans back enough to look into her face, to take her face in both hands as she's done for him so many times now. "You're not dead," he says simply, as if it weren't the wrong thing to say at all, as if that were a perfectly normal reassurance to need at this moment.

Alice licks her lips. "You're not dead either," she offers back. She shifts experimentally and glances down between them and feels her face heating again as she realizes she doesn't quite know - "How?" she asks.

"Here," he says, and his hands guide her and him and she mostly clutches at his shoulders and she hates that, a bit, doesn't want to be passive, but at the last moment he stops and waits and it's she who pushes down and takes and welcomes. His hips jerk up to meet hers. It hurts, it feels just exactly like losing something, like something breaking, and that's okay because it feels _right._ It feels like what she wanted, needed.

"Shh, love, shh," he murmurs, stroking her hair, and that's when Alice realizes she's started crying. "Is it bad? Is it very bad?"

"No," Alice manages, and wraps her arms tight around him and clings. "No, it's wonderful."

"Shh, I've got you," he says.

"I've got _you_ ," she argues, and he chuckles, and he moves, just a little, just once, and waits for her to react.

She tries to move too, and it stings, but it's not entirely a bad sting. She can feel his hand on her hip clenching, like he wants to grab and guide, but he doesn't. She can't even begin to express how much that makes it okay, so she just keeps trying. His breathing starts to go more ragged, his movements sharper, less voluntary. Alice thinks she's getting it right, and then she thinks that it doesn't matter if she's getting it right or not, it's not the quadrille, and she likes this, _this,_ this messy, sloppy, awkwardly clutching thing that they're doing.

"Alice," Tarrant is murmuring. Gasping. "Alice, _Alice_ \- Alice, I _can't_ \- I can't -"

"Then don't," she says simply, lips pressed against his ear. She kisses it for good measure, and the warm hollow just behind it, and his temple, and then she's being flipped up backward and pressed down into hats and hay and there's a shimmering cloud of dust around them again, just like when the Bandersnatch did a similar flop. She's laughing, and sneezing, and he's still inside her and his face is buried against her neck and she can hear him, feel him laughing too as he loses control entirely, so fast and so hard and so entirely, utterly unlike anything she ever expected of this. They're _laughing._ They're _covered in hay and Bandersnatch hair._ In a pile of _hats._

It's with some surprise that she realizes her body is tensing, tingling, a familiar cold-fire burning winding tighter and tighter, fast and sudden and then she's coming apart a moment before he does.

Then it's quiet, but for her still-pounding pulse. Very quiet, she realizes, and suddenly remembers the few gossipy horses and the oversized peacock (wearing a saddle) that she'd passed on her way in. Oh dear. She should care. She really should.

She really doesn't.

Tarrant rolls off of her, out of her, and that stings rather sharply. She turns over, following him, sprawling across his chest.

"That usually takes longer," he says, voice curiously devoid of any tone whatsoever.

Alice grabs the nearest hat and flops it down over his face as response. Then she crawls up under it (it's a very wide-brimmed hat - the one with all the ribbons, actually) and kisses him there in the hat-shrouded dark.

"I look forward to exploring this 'usually' with you," she tells him.

"That sounds like an excellent idea," he agrees. His fingers trace idle designs up and down her spine. She can feels the wind differently now, colder than it was a moment ago, and shivers. He pulls her closer, and she wriggles an arm free, shoving the bedding and the hats beneath them to one side or the other.

"What are you doing, Alice?" Tarrant asks.

"Burrowing," Alice answers. "I'm cold."

"We could dress," he suggests, though without much enthusiasm.

"If you'd rather dress than burrow into a pile of hats with me -"

She suddenly has help digging. They have a very cozy nest in very little time, made up of hay and hats and tangled legs. It's mad and glorious and nicely warm.

Tarrant's hands wander over her until one finds her lower belly, and stops.

Women _are_ rather more likely to get with child than men, Alice grudgingly acknowledges, if only to herself. It is a distinct possibility - especially if they keep doing this as often as she plans. He's thinking it too, she can tell.

In a moment he's going to say something, and it's going to make her think of that gazebo and Hamish, and that is the very last way that Alice wants this all to conclude, so before he can speak, she blurts out, "Can one elope, in Underland?"

There's quiet. Then there's his hand sliding away from her stomach, his arms drawing her impossibly tighter.

"One might have a hard time," he suggests. "But two, I suspect, could do so."

"Mm," Alice acknowledges the wisdom of this distinction.

His arms tighten momentarily, then he pulls back, sitting up; it lets cold air in, and Alice tugs a hat over her chest as she watches him fumbling through the detritus around them, flinging hats and garments about until he comes to his waistcoat and starts digging through the pockets. He produces a pair of scissors, a collection of needles stuck into a wad of lace, and a tiny pair of plyers, which he brandishes for her significantly. Alice gives him a very blank look, to which he frowns admonishingly, and then begins to gather up bits and snippets of the hats all around them.

Alice watches, once again fascinated by the inhuman speed of his movements. It makes her think of dragonflies darting, and of foxes vanishing back into the wood the minute you spot them, and of doing what they just did all over again. There's ripping and snipping and twisting and perhaps braiding? And then he's showing her what he's made.

Two rings, composed of bits of wire and cloth and lace and even braided hay and Bandersnatch hair, too many riotous colors to possibly fit into the tiny bands he's created, but they do. The weaving of them makes her vaguely dizzy, too intricate, she's not entirely sure that what she's looking at is actually possible.

But it is, thinks Alice, if she believes it is.

"There's a place at the edge of Tulgey Wood where . . where vows used to be said," he tells her. "No one but ghosts there now, not very official, which would be appropriate to an elopement - though the ghosts, I'll warn you, are terrible gossips."

"So are the horses," Alice murmurs, still staring in awe at the rings in the palm of his hand.

"The-" he suddenly seems to remember where they are, glancing around them at the incomplete walls of their stall. "Oh." He giggles.

"Exactly," Alice agrees. She reaches out a finger to touch the smaller of the rings.

"What do you think?" he asks - speaking, she thinks, of the rings. And also not of the rings.

"I think they're very. . they're very -" she swallows, can't find the right words, which is silly, of course. Of course she knows the right words. "They're very, very much, Tarrant. So very much."

***


End file.
